Debian? Sounds good to me!

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Back at the start of October, I decided to use Debian Squeeze
to fill an empty partition on my laptop hard drive. Since then, I've
been seeing a lot of Ubuntu news that makes me consider using Debian
instead of Ubuntu for future Linux installations.

Ubuntu is not Free

I understand that Ubuntu has made compromises so that e.g., people who
own nvidia-chipset video can get high performance OpenGL. However, that
compromise was supposed to be clearly marked, e.g., by the "restricted
drivers" icon.

When I installed Debian, my Intel 3945 wireless didn't work. I found
that Debian had categorized the firmware files as non-free. It was a
moderate inconvenience to use a wired connection to obtain the firmware
files, but more importantly I am now aware that I can't study the
firmware, I can't adapt the firmware, and I can't release my
improvements to the public. From the debian firmware-iwlwifi/copyright:
No reverse engineering, decompilation, or disassembly of this
software is permitted.

Ubuntu should have placed this driver behind the "restricted drivers" UI so
that users understand they are using non-free software. Of course, I'll
go on using my wireless card with the non-free firmware, but I'll no
longer go around telling my friends how much more Free the Intel
wireless chips are compared to the other choices out there.

Update: Since then, I have learned that separating out non-free firmwares
is one of the things the Debian project has done during the 6.0 'squeeze'
development cycle. An older version of Debian would apparently have
included these firmware images, just as Ubuntu did. Let's see whether
Ubuntu follows Debian and puts wireless firmwares behind the "restricted
drivers" icon.

Ubuntu communicates poorly with Unity

I don't have a dog in the Unity vs Gnome Shell race, but it's presented
yet another occasion where the message we seem to hear from Ubuntu is:
we don't care to work with existing projects to improve them. The other
message is of course: What Mark Shuttleworth wants, he gets.

…and again with Wayland

Is Ubuntu making bad decisions again? Are they just communicating
badly? Is Wayland a dessert topping, or is it a floor wax? People
who actually know X Server architecture like Keith Packard have been
saying for
years that the X server should be layered on top of OpenGL. If that's
the kind of dessert topping that Wayland is, I'm in favor of it too.

On the other hand, a lot of the talk about Wayland implies that X will
be an optional or emulated part of Wayland, with the default
API/transport being local-only. Does anybody working on Wayland
actually have a coherent criticism of X? This article from the
1990s might as well be
about Wayland Brand Floor Wax.

This (pdf) is what
a thoughtful criticism of X might look like. If you want to talk about
why Xlib and the X protocol should be dropped, talk about something like
this. If it's about "pixel perfection", then show us why it's not
possible with the Xlib API or the X wire protocol. If it's about
performance, show us where X falls short of Wayland. Don't treat it as
Received Truth that X is bad and needs to be replaced.
Update, circa 2013: Turns out Wayland bad, Mir good. OK, whatever.
Knock yourself out.

Or you can try just frothing at the mouth. It
was funny in the 90s, and it's still funny 16 years later. Well, at
least until somebody reads it, doesn't understand it's tongue-in-cheek,
mentions it to Mark Shuttleworth at UDS, and suddenly the order comes
down from on high: replace X with software that's not even written yet.

Changelogs? We don't need no stinkin' changelogs

This morning I read
that Ubuntu has started deliberately stripping changelog information
from binary packages. As far as I can tell there's no easy way to get
a changelog (e.g., an apt-get changelog that gets the information from
the network). You could download a source package, but do that a few
times and suddenly you're talking about serious network bandwidth, much
more than the two dozen megabytes that this reportedly saves on an
Ubuntu CD. Update, 9 Nov 2010: According to this blog entry, there will not only be a
apt-changelog program, but packages will also include the latest 10
changelog entries. This seems like a pretty good compromise to me,
but it's too bad there had to be a minor flap on the internet before it
happened.

Ubuntu features paid items ever more prominently

Ubuntu has a music store. Ubuntu ties in with Ubuntu One, a paid
storage service. Ubuntu will show paid apps in the Software Center.
These are not features I want in my Free Software operating system.

Serious Unix suffers under Ubuntu

Back in the days of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, I set up a small non-profit's
computer system. I used NFS for filesharing (including home
directories) and NIS for login information. When I replaced all the
hardware last year, I upgraded the OS to 9.10 and later to 10.04 LTS.
Unfortunately, there are glaring bugs in the startup process that make NFS unusable without hacks.
Upstart, or rather the incomplete conversion of packages to use upstart,
seems to be the cause of this problem. Yes, by all means choose a new
technology when it's better than the old one (Debian will also
choose upstart), but don't make
it the default before substantially all packages work properly with it.
And when you find out you've missed one, and it's a "5y"-supported
package like nfs-utils, maybe consider fixing it in the first year or so
after it's reported.

What Ubuntu value-add have I missed in Debian?

Only one so far. I miss the ability to control the volume of different
applications separately. I think I could have it back if I installed
pulseaudio.